There’s nothing like watching someone who is already in a hole dig deeper.

Yesterday, the New York Daily News ran an article that chronicled how the much ballyhooed mortgage fraud task force was going nowhere fast. It quoted task force co-chairman Eric Schneiderman as saying that the effort had no staff and no executive director and the Justice Department confirming that the effort had no office.

The problem, of course, is that bout of candor is inconsistent with recent efforts of the Administration to pretend that there was a serious effort underway. So, not surprisingly, a piece appeared today in the Nation that tried to dispute the Daily News account but a discerning reader would see it as a de facto confirmation.

The new Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group is marshaling parallel efforts on the state and federal levels to collaborate on current and future investigations, pooling resources and streamlining processes to investigate those responsible for misconduct contributing to the financial crisis in a comprehensive way. Significant efforts continue to move forward and if they uncover evidence of fraud or other illegal conduct, we will pursue such conduct aggressively.

Notice how wonderfully abstract this statement is? The key bit, if you read closely, is that the ONLY activity described is that of coordinating existing efforts. An anonymous DoJ source maintained that there were at least 50 DoJ staffers working on the effort. Dayen raised the question of whether they were working on the investigation or working on getting the effort staffed. I wonder, instead, what “working on” means (as in being in any way involved in the communication chain could be defined to be “working on”). Since the other co-chair, Lanny Breuer, had said the initiative would have only 55 people working on it, if 50 really were already up and running, there’d be no reason for the official response to be so labored. You’d get something more along the lines of: “We are at over 90% of our targeted manpower level.”

Today, George Zornick at The Nation tried rebutting the Daily News story. Amusingly, the piece tries to deny that not much new is happening yet is unable to dispute the charges made in the Daily News account. It’s worth discussing in some detail as an illustration of not-very-effective propaganda.

The critical part of the messaging is the headline: “Financial Fraud Task Force Is Active, Has Staffers.” Many people either don’t read articles or skim them in haste, so headlines have disproportionate weight. And you have to read the piece to learn how little “is active” and “has staffers” means.

The substance of the article starts with a statement from, not Schneiderman, who was a source for the Daily News piece, but his flack, Dan Kanner:

Kanner said 50 attorneys, investigators, and analysts across the country are already working on the task force, and that hiring would continue as investigations progressed. He added that the offices of several state attorneys general are also coordinating with the working group.

A Department of Justice official confirmed those staffing numbers, and said that ten U.S. Attorney offices were part of the effort, and that more were expected to join as the investigations progress. The Department of Justice has also asked Congress for $55 million to expand staffing.

Finally, both Kanner and the Department of Justice said that the five co-chairs of the task force meet formally on a weekly basis, and talk daily.

What does this really mean?

Existing mortgage investigation efforts and case development have been consolidated into the task force. The fact that that number appears to be only 50 is pathetic.

State attorneys general had been coordinating before the settlement. They didn’t need to bargain away many of their best theories of action in a broad release to continue those efforts.

Oh, and the article confirmed the lack of a dedicated office and executive director.

New York University law professor and former SIGTARP chief Neil Barofsky’s reaction:

The comments reinforce concerns that I had when the Task Force was first announced, that it would just be a repository for existing cases around the country that would eventually be brought irrespective of whether a task force was formed or not. Of course, there is no need for a dedicated office or staff if all they are doing is rebranding existing cases as new “Task Force” cases. If that is the case, all they would really need is someone to craft the press releases and to stand on the podium to take credit for other people’s work, which, of course, is what most task forces do best.

Let’s consider a different possibility. Recall that Schneiderman was embarrassed almost as soon as this effort was announced when he said the staffing of the effort would be in the hundreds and Lanny Breuer corrected him by saying it would be 55. The DoJ keeps maintaining that the number of people working on this effort now is over 50. It is increasingly looking like the 55 that were promised for this effort was simply the staff working on existing mortgage cases, plus per Barofsky, an executive director and maybe a PR person and “coordinator” to burnish appearances.

In other words, both the critic’s and Administration’s accounts are probably true once you parse the definitions. Schneiderman and the world at large thought the underwhelming 55 that were promised to be tasked to this program would be dedicated additional resources. But the Administration appears to have simply added up the bodies working on existing efforts and rounded it up to 55 for the extra people who would have to be dedicated for PR purposes.

Underestimating this Administration’s cynicism has been a losing trade, and there is no reason to think this case is an exception.

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63 comments

Well, there’s Sheila in Finance, Fred in Accounting, Bob in HR, umm, Joe the janitor, uhh, Dave the IT guy with the really good pot, uh, oh, Sally and Lou the liaisons from DOJ. Let’s see. Oh, Luis the librarian and Xin Lu the intern who do all the actual work. Can we count Schneiderman? He never shows up for meetings. Hell, let’s count him. So that’s ten….

They will steal it. That is what they do. Find new ways to rob us and gamble off of our robbery and demise. There are psychopaths running the world. They are professional thieves. I read that some Judges are planning on adding 30 million dollars to their pension funds out of fraudclosures. Nice huh?

They are winding down the trusts so fast – they’ll be gone before the task force gets it’s act together. The statute of limitations will have passed, fraud will be moot and these mobsters will start all over again with no regulation.

I hope you are at least slightly embarrassed for earlier attempts to emblazon the name Schneiderman across the pantheon of crusading law enforcement heroes. He makes Pecora look like a giant, although of course he is eighty years too late to keep the man himself from having been a midget. Or was the midget on JP Morgan’s lap somebody else?

I am not holding my breath waiting for a State Attorney General (or any other law enforcement official, State or Federal, past or present) who is not a clown. Can anybody name one?

Google halo effect. You are exhibiting a big cognitive bias, and I suggest you get familiar with it.

In case you managed to forget it, Schneiderman early on stood alone as the ONLY AG to defy the Administration and question the settlement. He occupied that position for months. There would have been no opposition to the settlement at all if Schneiderman has not take the lead.

That of course made him the logical person to target, which the Administration did very effectively.

Anybody can stand up in front of television cameras and talk a good game. That’s all Schneiderman ever did. I warned you about him from the beginning. Hindsight is not involved.

You cannot expect people who are made by the system to fight the system. Falling into line behind these pied pipers is a waste of time. This is how Obama got elected. People ignored who he was and who was behind him, and instead they got excited about what he said. Oooooh, he’s so intelligent and such an antidote to GWB!

I always loved the part about his making the Harvard Law Review by writing an essay which they destroyed so nobody could read it. Run that by anybody who went to HLS in 1967. I wonder how Morty Horowitz felt about it? He made it the hard way and would have made a much better President too. maybe better than Roosevelt.

They are all following orders from the WORLD BANK. Bloomberg news interviewed IMF director Christine Laguarde today who said the banks need to forget about the word SOVEREIGNTY because the banks have $2 trillion dollars in debt ON THEIR BALANCE SHEETS. Not a word about the $1.2 quadrillion that the banksters have hidden off balance sheet in their shadow electronic bank. The massive fraud debt that the banksters can never repay. Laguarde also said that the U.S. GOV better start FORCING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO PAY THE MORTGAGE! So therefore it is way past time for everyone to stop paying everything. The WORLD BANK is obviously intending on robbing us and bankrupting the people for all of the debt fraud of their financial institutions. its all a sham and a massive fraud so why help the crooks out by handing them any money? BLOOMBERG NEWS reported today that the FED has earned $11 BILLION DOLLARS SO FAR FROM THE BAILOUT OF AIG.. All while the FED banks owe the U.S. TAXPAYERS hundreds of trillions of dollars from the Origination fraud and other ill gotten gains they earned by committing a quadrillion dollars in fraud in our names with our signatures. Charity starts at home.

Absolutely pathetic to see how The Nation has become a vehicle for White House/DOJ/ DNC disinformation. I gave up a 25- year subscription because of its slanted, credulous coverage of the neoliberal takeover of public education. With its shilling for Obama in hyper-drive, that was clearly the right decision.

I believe we are being held hostage by a World Bank/IMF/Federal Reserve tyranny. The media does alot of playing along with the jerks but, they do leak the truth sometimes. Like when CNBC reported that Wall Street made $60 trillion dollars in the year 1999 from mortgage derivatives. CNBC revealed that the Illuminati crashed the stock market on 08. The video is still on you tube. Bloomberg News does reveal a lot of stuff about these Globalists. WE THE PEOPLE have to unite and stop participating in this fraud. This crisis is completely manufactured and what IMF mouthpiece Laguarde said today proves it is all true. They are out for our wealth, our freedom, our independence and our National Sovereignty. They are using the debt fraud created by their financier perps as a guise to destroy us.

Surprise…! CNBC’s Rick Santelli trying to convince us we need principle writedowns. Mr. Santelli has no explanation on how to write down $1.2 quadrillion dollars in unsustainable derivatives fraud committed by the banks. Bernanke is talking another QE. If that happens, there will be a financial collapse the likes of which we have never seen. People can’t pay there bills now or are barely scraping by. If Obama and CONGRESS/ the SENATE allow this robbery of the American people by the FED to continue or ramp up, they are all traitors the likes of which we have never seen. Time to make the FED rescind, issue our own currency and abolish the FED.

@C…Here is the link. You can also you tube search the words…CNBC Guest, (Illuminati Behind Stock Market Crash)…I just want to add that Jim Cramer said a while ago that this is a Bavarian Illuminati conspiracy. Here’s that link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwA3VazORY0

it takes a lot of time and effort to craft such bs
they don’t have to time for actual work/reform

jesse puts it best
symptomatic of the broader problem

Yes, Obama faces a rigid and uncompromising opposition in the Congress, which achieved its House majority during his term I might add, but he still has broad Presidential powers, including the ability to direct the enforcement activities of the regulators and the Justice Department.

And not one major participant in the fraud has been indicted and prosecuted. Instead, the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the fraud have crafted the words for the very reforms which they have opposed and weakened every step of the way. And the regulatory agencies continue to hand out wristslap fines for egregious market frauds that continue to add to the deterioration of the confidence of average market participants.

If the US had a Parliamentarian system, Prime Minister Obama would have most likely already been ushered out the door.

Am I being too harsh? He promised much, and achieved little, and broke almost every major pledge he had made to his constituency in his zeal to curry favor with those who would have nothing to do with his mandate. In this he is more Chamberlain than Hoover, who at least acted on his principles that were unfortunately mistaken as he later admitted.

When he writes his memoirs I will be shocked if the current President does not paint a picture of magnificent accomplishments, and for the shortcomings, blame everyone but himself and his inability to execute on principle.

President Obama will undoubtedly provide a good case study for the failure in leadership in a crisis for future historians

The media propaganda machine is reporting that Obama has a 66% chance of winning re-election. Are they conducting these polls in another country like they count the votes? I don’t see the support for either party by the people. Its all a show. Time for the people to walk out of their show and stop participating in all of their fraud. When we stop participating the show and their game is over.

Sid..I know elections are manufactured by the media That was my point. The electoral college is a sham. Popular vote should be the only way to elect a President. If the electoral college elects the President that means when we vote we are just participating in a popularity contest and voting is meaningless so why vote? The truth is that everything is rigged for our failure and we’ve all been had. Time for the American people to walk out of the show, state by state.

Along with the special falsehood, there’s the general falsehood that’s been attached to the word ‘work’.

The inhabitants of middle management define a meeting as ‘work.’ Any meeting, any time, any participants, any discussion, any results, the meeting is ‘work’ and what goes on in a meeting is ‘work’.

So, sit around for a few minutes, tell a few golf stories, maybe talk in general terms about the nominal purpose of the enterprise, and they’ve ‘worked.’ A few resolutions are forged and plans are made. Everyone repeats a good intention and agrees about how good the intention is. After some longer or shorter time, everyone gets up and leaves. The larger world is unchanged

If you think those meetings aren’t work you haven’t attended enought of them. Just getting to the meetings is work. I spent three years in a big company working for a guy who had to make meetings in Buffalo (in January) beginning at 9AM. Our office was in New York. We would fly out of LaGuardia (or whatever they call it now) at 6:30. Get to the meeting at 9. At 10 the meetng was over. It was back to airport, back to NY for lunch, back the office at 3. Out of the office at 5:30. Try that once just for fun. As for the details of the meeting, I don’t remember any. My boss liked to tell stories. The Buffalo guys were polite and fearful. They served coffee and donuts. I tried to remain awake. You think this isn’t work? Clearly, you are too result oriented. It’s about process.

Sad but true in many cases. That’s one reason we should just hand out money to the unemployed and let them find their own work to do instead of paying them to waste their time. Of course another reason is simple justice. One should not have to work to get back what was stolen from him/her.

I too read that piece. I especially loved how he spent most of his blog confirming that the “task force” has no office, no discernable staff of its own, no coordinator, and no visible direction of any kind. But because some spokesperson said otherwise that means there totally is an active task force you guys! Stop laughing!

At this point, we’d have better luck waiting for Godot to show up than waiting for Schneiderman, et al. to save us from the banksters. I knew in the back of my mind that Schneiderman had a price if the Powers That Be were willing to pay it. At the very least, I wish that price wasn’t so damned cheap.

David, the 50 AG settlement gave away criminal prosecution of these cases. It did not, and could not, immunize the banks in case by case civil suits. The problem is that most homeowners cannot afford the legal services to fight, and when you do fight, the bank does eveything it can to rachet up the legal bill (multiple motions, frivolous appeals, etc.) to wear out the homeonwer from being able to continue to fund the case.

That’s why a homeowner was awarda a few million a week or two ago in punitive damages, because the bank , and I think it was Wells Fargo, ran up the homeowner’s legal cost to the tune of a couple hundred thousand dollars over a foreclosure amount of only $24K.

It is this same behavior that got Lynn Syzmoniak a multi million dollar settlement on her whistle blower suit.

It’s the civil cases. One house at a time. If I had the money, I would set up a legal clinic to do these kinds of cases. I have tried to interest local law schools in setting up such clinics, but so far, no success.

Any thoughts on how to get that ball going? I was much struck by Pearl’s comment in the earlier story on the invisible mortgage settlement monitor, who is also ludicrously understaffed and nonperforming. She as a motivated private citizen would be happy to pitch in and do the necessary research work, and thinks there are plenty out here who would too. So, can you see any way to opensource/crowdsource the real work these task forces aren’t going to do?

If not, then what? Title’s screwed, regulation’s screwed, courts are screwed, it’s all screwed. I guess I want to quit moaning and start doing something to fix things. Where are the legal clinics?

They must be working to a formula. You don’t churn out these motions on a, er, a “case by case” basis. Remember the recent comment looking to pay lawyers $20 an hour on CraigsList? If I were an evil manager organizing this, I’d work from a script.

If the script could be crowd-sourced, the same crowd, were it seeded with lawyers, could reverse engineer the script and throw their own f***s back at them.

Not realistic? It seems to be me the missing piece is not the desire to fight, but isolation, and lack of an online search facility.

Think of it this way: You’re fighting spam from the banks, using pattern recognition. And instead of putting the spam in your spam folder, you’re returning a motion.

We need to go back in time, around the time Clinton came into office – John Dugan handed in a book report prepared by a new generation of aggressive profiteers high on conservative ideology. Bubba basically put this blueprint into law, a deregulated senseless foray into guranteed implosion, and epic fail. The players are numerous but if one of Eric Holder’s associates stands out, it is tool Dugan.
I find it disturbing the legal profession itself hasn’t been rocked to the core by the amount of fraud – you have these “lawyers’ who turn out to be some of the most powerful destructive people imaginable, whether working for Fannie Mae or op-eding from some so-called tower of academia. But then there are some good guys….

“AG Holder effectively squashed all FBI investigations into actions of TBTF banks in 2008, when he arrived in office. No actions were initiated until the s#$% hit the fan in October 2010, when robo-signing scandal bubbled up in national media.”

HARRY SHEARER: So, normally what would happen in that case would be the Justice Department would set up a task force or something like to go into this and investigate, or tell the FBI to go in and investigate?

BILL BLACK: Yes, that’s exactly what would happen. That’s what we did back in the savings and loan crisis for a – again, compared to this? A teeny tiny crisis. Here, Bush’s Attorney General, Mukasey – and this is way late in the game, this is in 2008 – refuses to create a national task force and says that these frauds are simply the equivalent of “white collar street crime.” In other words, it’s picayune stuff not worth worrying about.

HARRY SHEARER: Except the street was Wall Street.
…

BILL BLACK: So what were we left with instead? So we got agents from the FBI with no expertise on sophisticated financial frauds at this time, with no guidance from the regulators, where they’re getting actively misguided by the industry doing their old, you know, Obi Wan Kenobi stuff? “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for [laughs] – go look at those droids,” you know? Go look at the little guys, not looking at us.

For any of you in Washington State that have been affected by these mortgage crimes and are willing to fight, please visit http://www.propertydefensenetwork.com. We have a goal of 5000 quiet titles. We are working from a premise that Sheila Bair said that a year ago, there were 110,000 lawsuits by homeowners against the big banks and those numbers were straining the system….we figure if we can start to double that number, we can break the court system. We’ve got around 20 lawfirms geared up…and we are putting mechanisms in place to reach the lofty goal of 5000 QTs for Washington State. Let’s do this!

Oh, and to answer your question of where are the legal clinics? If they are like our Columbia Legal…..they are bought by the banking community and are worthless.

Google “60 Minutes” and “Lynn Syzmoniak” and at the end of the episode, the reporter talks to Bair and she says that 110,000 lawsuits is nearly breaking the system. Let’s all try to double that number and sincerely break the system.

I asked earlier about a San Diego case, Gomes vs Countrywide, where, as I understand it, an owner tried to use a “show me the note” defense and failed. Yves did a skeptical diary on it when it filed for Supreme Court appeal (which also failed). Shanikka at Daily Kos had written an in-depth discussion on it at the time it lost its California 4th Apellate Court appeal The “Show Me the Note, MERS” Defense – A Cautionary Tale — she was hugely frustrated at the damage its legal ineptitude cost all Californians. I still don’t understand it. Even if the case was handled badly, surely there is something to work with? A starting place, if we want to start somewhere?

I am not a lawyer but, like Pearl, I can do something and I want to pitch in.

There was a moment in Obama’s 2008 campaign that practically had me giddy. I think it was a town hall or something, and his answer was “Watch me.” It was like the guy who had the magic was finally going to show us how it was done. Like if John Lennon turned to cameras in 1963 just before the Beatles took the stage and said “Watch this.” I think the people could be like that, if we could just set to it. Like the last line in the movie Meet John Doe — “There you are, Mr. [MOTU], the people! Try and lick that!” I keep waiting for that moment, I know it’s out there.

program of action : run for county recorder of deeds, find the fraud (that you will when you review the county porperty records) … and show the owners of the duopolistic supported white collar crime spree what it means to be a ‘citizen’ – I am confident that you can do these things .. gandhi said “the truth never damages a just cause” & g.singlaub said ‘when you sit down, they win”

Better late than. . . . . . . . . ! They must teach this method in Law School, “how to make an ass of yourself while trying to look serious”. The good [?] A.G., just like the “O”, had the potential going for him, but just like the “O”, he sold out too. Now he’s backpeddling! Oh me oh my. Is this great KABUKI, or what? Crying is just too depressing, unless of course, the tears being shed, come from laughing ones head off, so to speak.

“There’s nothing like watching someone who” has no legal training or judgment set themselves up as some kind of authority as to what is and is not doable, and how it should be done. Maybe there’s no need for a new bureaucracy to coordinate – maybe it is enough that the staff doing the investigation at each agency can now cooperate and consult. Or maybe that’s not the best use of very limited resources.

Maybe the war is won by the soldiers, sailors and marines now being able to work together – as they’ve wanted to do all along – and not by a new Joint Chiefs, with a new HQ and shiny new uniforms.

Don’t kid yourself – this kind of bitter criticism just creates bitterness. Only a political fool undermines the people closest to his own position. Help your allies and fight your enemies – is that so hard to understand?

No he is not perfect – but his shortcomings are due to lack of resources not lack of spirit. What’s the budget and staff he has to work with? Now compare that to the legal team at one bank or one federal agency.

First show me someone who has done more – then you can criticize the guy who has done the most.

Fraudclosures are still happening because the FED banks owe everybody in our names and our signatures and therefore our property is the pawns in their game. That is why they are throwing people into fraudclosure who paid their homes off etc….The reason is these crooks have overinsured our property to the hilt. I have proof. My commercial property mortgage was for $500,000.00 but, on the mortgage they recorded it says the mortgage was for $1.6 million dollars! They cross collateralized my home with the business on an Alta-A loan all done without my knowledge…..ALL FRAUD. This is insurance fraud on steroids but even the fact that they overinsured everything that is still NOT ENOUGH MONEY to pay off their overpledged notes. I found they are still gambling on the cross collat even though I have the paid note and mortgage in my possession. It was paid off by the fraud originator. Amcore Bank N.A. on a refi. The vultures who are buying up these fraudclosures are feeding on poison when the crap hits the fan and it will because there is not enough money on the planet to pay off $1.2 quadrillion dollars in derivatives fraud debt. The FED needs to be abolished for destroying America by committing a quadrillion dollars in fraud in our names.